Amazon raises the price of Prime to $12.99 a month

If you are subscribing to Amazon Prime month-by-month, Amazon has some bad news for you. Starting today, the price for a monthly subscription rises from $10.99 each month to $12.99. Roughly an 18 percent increase in cost, this shift will likely encourage more users to either cancel or sign up for the yearly service (which is unchanged at $99 a year).

Conceptually, the monthly subscription plan was a way for Amazon to reach families that simply didn’t need Amazon Prime more than the holiday shopping season. This price increase will also impact college students that subscribe monthly, raising that cost from $5.49 each month to $6.49.

This price shift will not impact lower income customers on government assistance. Using a valid Electronic Benefits Transfer (EBT) card, those customers can still subscribe to Prime at a cost of $5.99 a month. It also doesn’t impact customers who only want a Prime Video membership (which doesn’t include any shipping benefits). That cost remains unchanged at $8.99 each month.

Of course, the yearly fee remains the most cost effective way for a regular consumer to subscribe to Amazon Prime. At $99 a year, that cost breaks down to roughly $8.25 per month. You can also share the membership with someone else in your household as well as kids (for streaming video access). You can read about more benefits in our breakdown here.

About Mike Flacy

By day, I'm the Editor-in-Chief for The CheckOut in addition to being the content manager for Steve's Digicams and High-Def Digest. During my free time, I love to write about pop culture, home theater, digital photography, social media, mobile technology and cool gadgets!

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